Alfred, Andreas, and Stefan share their thoughts

Running bash as root’s shell only when it’s not broken

I like bash, mostly for its interactive features over FreeBSD’s standard Bourne-compatible shell, ash.

Setting bash as the default shell for the root user however has a big downside: if you ever break bash or any of the libraries it depends on, you can’t log in as root anymore to fix it. I’ve tried quite a few ways to work around this, and I think I’ve finally figured out a good solution: leave the root shell as /bin/sh, and add this snippet at the end of /root/.profile: